Vogue Sees Web Lessons in Obama’s Campaign

The Web consulting firm Blue State Digital helped the Obama campaign raise some $500 million online, catapulting a relative political novice into the Oval Office.

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Vogue editor Anna Wintour

Its next challenge: Help fashion bible Vogue magazine cash in on its far-reaching influence at a time when advertising dollars are bleeding out of print.

Vogue has hired Blue State Digital to help analyze the Conde Nast publication’s audience as part of a broader, revenue-generating push that ultimately will involve implementing paid subscriptions on Vogue.com, said Tom Florio, publishing director for Vogue and several other Conde Nast magazines. The hiring was previously reported on Gawker Media’s Jezebel.

The collaboration between magazine publisher and Web strategist began several months ago when Diego Scotti, Vogue’s executive director of marketing, emailed Blue State Digital co-founder Joe Rospars. Vogue executives, keenly aware that the monthly magazine is just one of many ways people connect with the publication, had been looking for ways to capitalize on its influence.

The question, Mr. Florio said, was “Can we take a strategy to build a political candidate and apply it to a magazine like Vogue?”

Since the presidential campaign, Blue State Digital has accelerated its push beyond the political realm into nonprofits, organized labor and commercial ventures, among other sectors.

Over the course of several meetings, Mr. Rospars and his colleagues took Vogue executives through presentations on how the firm cultivated and organized prospective Obama supporters.

Blue State Digital used what it calls a “relationship ladder,” which broke down voters into increasingly targeted groups based on the depth of their involvement, from the 13 million people on the campaign’s email list up to the 200,000 people who hosted events.

Vogue’s relationship ladder begins with what it calls its “distributed audience,” which includes anyone who interacts with Vogue at any level, from reading an article about the magazine to buying a dress that appeared in it. Beyond them, Vogue hopes to identify people who pass along information about the brand and, ultimately, people willing to pay for access to certain material on Vogue.com.

Vogue’s approach, like Blue State Digital’s, is a departure from the standard practice of identifying an audience and promptly asking for money. For the campaign, Blue State Digital operated on the premise that there are many types of transactions between a campaign and voters, and that to maximize transactions it had to start by drilling deeper into the lives of potential supporters.

“It’s a decidedly different approach,” Mr. Florio said. “The more we understand the interaction with the brand, the more we’ll be able to cultivate the relationship with them relating to their needs, which ultimately leads to monetizing the relationship” through channels like e-commerce and subscriptions.